Gandhi, Advocacy Journalism, and the Media

Foreword

In that famous 1922 trial in Ahmedabad, where Mohandas K. Gandhi told the imperial judge that he was proud to be a seditionist, he also described himself, with selective honesty, as a weaver and a farmer. However, the profession he practiced for most of his adult life was journalism.

Writing in periodicals, and editing them, is what Gandhi did continuously from 1903, when Indian Opinion first appeared in Natal, until his assassination in New Delhi in 1948. British imperialism being as peculiar as Gandhi, for a short spell he was even allowed to edit his weekly newspaper Harijan from Yeravada Jail.

When journalists interviewed him, Gandhi took care to clarify or advance his political aims, but with some he also became a teacher. Sailen Chatterjee (1923–2001), who worked for the news agency UPI (United Press of India), recalled to me in the 1990s his first Gandhi interview, which took place in 1945 in the hill town of Panchgani. Asking to see Chatterjee’s story before it was filed, Gandhi evidently shortened and improved it, and offered Chatterjee tips for future stories.

It was in London in the year 1888 that 19-year-old Gandhi, law student from an Indian backwater, began his dialogue with the media. Spending an hour every day reading the conservative Daily Telegraph, the liberal Daily News, and the impudent Pall Mall Gazette, he nurtured the future political leader inside of him while also learning new words and the art of writing.

By the time Indian Opinion was launched in Durban in June 1903, Gandhi also knew why he was writing, which was to remedy an unpleasant world where, in his words, people “felt themselves honored by the humiliation of their fellow-beings.”¹ Because notions of “high” and “low” were entertained not merely by the white race dominating South Africa but also within ←ix | x→its community of immigrants from India, Gandhi’s journal was brought out in Gujarati, Tamil, and Hindi as well as in English.

The journal’s opening issue claimed it would highlight the “undeserved and unjust” disabilities under which South Africa’s Indians labored and would also “unhesitatingly point out” Indian faults.² In addition, it would enable South Africa’s victimized and depressed Indian community to “think audibly” through letters and comments.³

Gandhi wrote of having realized “in the very first month” of Indian Opinion that while control on a newspaper from without was “more poisonous than want of control,” an “uncontrolled pen” could also destroy.⁴

Asserting that while Indian Opinion had endeavored “never to depart from the strictest facts in dealing with the difficult questions that have arisen” and to write nothing “with a view to hurt,” its writers “believed in the righteousness of the cause” they espoused and would “always place before readers” facts “in their nakedness.”⁵

These norms were retained for the multi-language journals Gandhi ran in India after his return from South Africa in 1915: Young India, Navajivan, and Harijan. The journals were weapons for his goals of India’s independence, Hindu-Muslim partnership, and the abolition of untouchability, and platforms for explaining his strategy of nonviolence. Here’s what he wrote in Young India in July 1925:

I may not write in anger or malice. I may not write idly. I may not write merely to excite passion… Often my vanity dictates a smart expression or my anger a harsh adjective. It is… a fine exercise to remove these weeds. The reader sees the pages of Young India fairly well dressed-up and is inclined to say, “What a fine old man this must be!” Well, let the world understand that the fineness is carefully and prayerfully cultivated.⁶

His comment almost a century ago (in 1927) on Katherine Mayo’s Mother India, a book which for decades influenced Americans’ thinking about India, is instructive even today for nationalists anywhere. Exposing India’s insanitation and other widespread defects, Mayo’s book praised the role of the country’s British rulers. Conceding that the volume was “cleverly and powerfully written,” Gandhi called it the report of an “inspector of open drains and their stench.” He added:

Whilst I consider the book to be unfit to be placed before Americans and Englishmen (for it can do no good to them), it is a book that every Indian can read with some degree of profit. We may… not repudiate the substance underlying the many allegations she has made. It is a good thing to see ourselves as others see us. We need not even examine the motive with which the book is written (Young India, September 15, 1927).⁷←x | xi→

March 20, 1947: I would like you ... to tell me what you can about the Punjab tragedy. I know nothing about it save what is allowed to appear in the Press … Nor am I in sympathy with what may be termed by the old expression of “hush hush policy.” It is amazing how the country is adopting almost the very measures which it criticized during the British administration.⁸

Since the urge to control or coerce was not confined to governments, and India’s citizens too were tempted to bully fellow citizens, Gandhi spoke up for an individual’s right to resist pressure. In February 1946, when over-enthusiastic patriots insisted that people they met on the street shout Jai Hind! (Victory to India), Gandhi promptly objected:

Inasmuch as a single person is compelled to shout Jai Hind, or any popular slogan (he said), a nail is driven into the coffin of Swaraj.⁹

Journalist Gandhi, as also Gandhi the individual and Gandhi the leader, lived for the freedom to think, believe, and express. Seventy-four years after his death, independent India witnesses powerful and sometimes successful attempts to deny those freedoms. Influential voices insist that these freedoms are for select Indians, not for all. It’s a global trend, this assertion that a nation belongs not to all in it but to its dominant section. This troubling reality brings extra relevance to Gandhi, Advocacy Journalism, and the Media. I welcome its publication.

—Rajmohan Gandhi,

Urbana, Illinois

Introduction

The origin of this book about Mohandas K. Gandhi’s journalism career came in 2002 when my wife Kalpana Ramgopal and I had an arya samaj wedding in Chennai, India, her hometown. While we were in India, we took a trip to the Mumbai suburb of Thane to visit my wife’s grandmother. My wife’s uncle, N. R. Subramaniam, agreed to drive us from Thane to Mani Bhavan Gandhi, a house in Gamdevi where Gandhi would stay on his trips to Mumbai (then Bombay). While we were at Mani Bhavan, I discovered in the small library that Gandhi had run several newspapers during his lifetime. I thought this was something I—and probably most other journalism historians in North America—should have known; that is, that Gandhi, in addition to being the architect of independence and a practitioner of nonviolent resistance, had been a journalist. From that point forward, I began to gather what information I could about Gandhi’s career as an editor and writer.

Several years later, while I was teaching at Iowa State University, I had the good fortune to be on a committee that ran the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication’s annual First Amendment Day. In one of those celebrations of Americans’ most basic civil rights, we invited Mary Beth and John Tinker to speak to our students. The Tinkers had used Gandhian tactics to protest the war in Vietnam in 1965, wearing black armbands to school and earning a suspension. They sued the Des Moines, Iowa, school district and went on to victory four years later in the U.S. Supreme Court, which held that civil rights are not suddenly suspended at the schoolhouse gate.

Then, in August 2011, our family moved to Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. Suddenly, I found myself living in a nation where the largest single group was South Asians (Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, and Bangladeshis), and I was only a three-hour flight from Mumbai or New Delhi. The idea of researching Gandhi as a journalist began to accelerate. ←1 | 2→I swooped up anything I could find about Gandhi’s experiences as an editor and began to make trips to India and Great Britain to further my research.

Gandhi’s great gift to the world, satyagraha, remains alive and well as can be seen in recent developments as this book was written. In India, ←2 | 3→the nation’s farmers descended on New Delhi to protest against the ruling regime’s agricultural policies. Even in Georgia, the home of this volume’s editor, members of the state legislature assembled in a sit-in at the state house in Atlanta. In that same city, one can visit the Peace Center enshrining the nonviolent direct political action of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and find a room devoted to Gandhi.

To that end, I want to thank the staffs at various libraries and museums around the world, including the National Gandhi Museum in Delhi; Gandhi Smriti in New Delhi; Gandhi Bhavan in Bengaluru; Gandhi Mandapan in Chennai; Mani Bhavan Gandhi in Mumbai; the Himachal Pradesh State Library in Shimla; the Gandhi Development Trust in Phoenix Settlement, South Africa; the British Library in London; the Cambridge University Library and the Cambridge Centre for South Asian Studies; the Literary and Philosophical Society Library in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England; the Augusta University Reese Library; Guilford College Library in Greensboro, N.C.; Coe College Library in Cedar Rapids, Iowa; and the Parks Library at Iowa State University. I also appreciate all the bookstores where I purchased Gandhi books—in Bengaluru (Blossom must be noted as being the singular best bookshop to find Gandhi literature), New Delhi, Chennai, Pretoria, Johannesburg, Durban, Cambridge, London, Oxford, St. Andrews, Berlin, Madrid, Vienna, Boston, Chicago, New York, San Francisco Washington, ←3 | 4→D.C., Montreal, and Toronto. I also want to thank Dr. Chandrika Kaul at the University of St. Andrews for hosting a Gandhi-and-the-media conference at her wonderful university in October 2019 on the 150th anniversary of Gandhi’s birth. Many of the ideas for this book germinated at that conference. I also want to thank Eric P. Ries, Sue Morehouse, and Farwa Imam Ali for their help in editing the manuscript.